Bernard Wambugu: From Kenya to Small-Town America to Top of The World

I am seated on the comfy lounge chairs on the patio of Straits Restaurant in Houston, Texas, waiting for Bernard Wambugu, CEO of Lantel Systems, to arrive. He is currently in meetings with clients and he is running very late. I don’t mind the wait; it gives me more time to think about our interview. I heard a lot about Bernard before I finally met him about 3 months ago. He has a reputation as an extremely hard worker, very disciplined, very focused but above all as a man of integrity with a strong faith and devoted to his wife and children. How does he do it? What motivates him? As an immigrant, his is a true success story and I can’t wait to hear it. After he arrived and offered several profuse apologies, we sat down to chat about work, family, faith, his passion for Africa and making a difference in the lives of others.

If it were not for the insistence and secretive planning of his mother, Bernard would never have come to the US. After he graduated high school in Kenya in 1993, he was recruited to play basketball and work for Barclays Bank in Nairobi. He had dreams of being a ball player and with a job as a banker he felt he had it made. He joined the local University, University of Nairobi, but his mother had other plans for him. She encouraged him to attend college in the US but he resisted and declared he had no intention to ever leave Kenya. In December 1996, his mother handed him admission papers to Wharton Community College in Texas plus a plane ticket. Unbeknownst to him, she had applied on his behalf to several colleges in the US. He was shocked and promptly refused the offer. And, why Wharton, anyway? She said she had selected the school for two main reasons—it was in a warm place and it was the only school where she could afford to pay his tuition for the first semester. She continued to try and persuade him and finally offered that if he did not like it he could come back home. With that caveat, Bernard agreed to make the trip.

Bernard’s introduction to the US was not a pleasant one. He spent his first night sleeping outdoors at his new college in the middle of the worst ice storm that the area had experienced. So much for the warm weather his mother had promised him. The school was closed because of the ice storm and the one security guy he found patrolling the school was unable to reach any of the school officials to let them know that Bernard had arrived. He had $200 in his pocket having already spent half of the $400 his mother had given him on the longest taxi ride of his life from Houston Bush Airport to the school. He did not know a single soul in the entire US let alone in Wharton. He was on his own, thousands of miles away from his hometown of Nairobi, Kenya.

The next day, a professor turned up on campus and was able to contact someone to open the dorm for him. Bernard learnt that the school would not open for another week because of the storm so he spent that week as the lone student on campus, living in the dorm, walking around Wharton town and eating at McDonalds. All he could think of was going back home. He tried to call his mother but could never get through. Later he learnt that he had not been using the phone booth correctly. When school finally opened, he showed up at the International Office and they immediately called his mother back in Kenya. She had been frantically calling the school for a whole week looking for him. Unable to reach anyone at the school and not having heard from him she feared the worst. When he finally spoke with his mother, she was so emotional with relief that he was safe that he decided to spare her the details of his ordeal since arriving in the US. He was worried that he was running out of money and all he could think about was going back home but he turned his attention to registering for his classes.

Fortunately, the school felt so badly that he had been on his own for the first week, that they offered him a room in the dorm and a cafeteria meal plan for the rest of the semester. But his heart was still set on returning to Kenya so a few weeks later he called his mother and told her that he had tried to make the best of it but that he really wanted to come home. Meanwhile his mother was undergoing some difficult challenges at home. The bank where she held her savings had collapsed and she had lost a significant amount of money. She was very honest with him, telling him that she could either spend the little money she had to buy him a ticket to come back home or she could use the money to pay tuition fees for his siblings who were still in Kenya. Bernard agreed to stay in the US a little longer.

As winter turned to spring, he knew he had to start earning money for his continued living expenses but his ultimate plan was to earn enough to buy his own ticket home. He started mowing lawns. That summer he worked long hours, 12 hours a day sometimes, outside in the Texas heat. He was mowing lawns, fencing, baling hay, building roads. Any work he could get, he took it. Again he spared his mother the details of his struggles. He told her he was a “landscape technician” and she bragged to her family and friends about his “good job”. Little did she know he was a “grass cutter”—a far cry from his job as a banker back home.

I asked him, what he thought of those early days and how far he has come. He expressed his gratitude for the opportunity and told me that he has never worked harder than he did that summer. His early experience developed an indomitable work ethic in him. Every time he thinks something is too difficult, he remembers those days—the heat, the fatigue, his blistered hands, and he knows that he can persevere. His other memory of that summer was the everyday Americans that he met. This was rural Texas; he worked on their yards and on their farms. “I got to see greatness", he recalls “in decent, hardworking people, devoted to their families and their communities”.

Bernard focused on working hard with the singular goal of saving enough to buy his ticket home. However, something unexpected happened along the way, and that “something” was his wife Mabel. His version of the story was that they met in college; she thought he was cute and seven weeks later they were married! Seriously? I needed to wait until Mabel joined us later so that I could get the full scoop.

Mabel took up the story when she joined us later that evening, laughing as she recounted those days. They were introduced by a mutual friend. Bernard soon became her math tutor. During one of their tutoring sessions, he was dismayed by her “poor math skills” and so she challenged him, “Wow, you think you are so smart, let me see your grades”. He obliged. She took one look at his transcript, saw an 18 credit load and straight As and said to him, “Wow, you are really smart, we should get married”. He laughed since marriage was the farthest thing from his mind—he could barely survive, had only two pairs of jeans (one for school and one for work), so how was he going to fulfill the dreams of any girl? Mabel egged him on and told him to meet her at the courthouse the following Friday. He thought she was joking but she was dead serious.

She showed up in her best dress and her hair freshly styled, the groom was nowhere to be found. She tracked him down to his room, where she found him in his pajamas. She was as shocked to find him there as he was to learn that she had actually gone to the courthouse. They had a long chat as to why they should get married and the next Tuesday, with a few witnesses present, they said their vows. And that afternoon they went right back to their classes. When I asked her why she proposed to him she said, “I wasn’t in love with him, but I did think he was cute and he was smart but most of all he was very kind hearted and I gravitated towards that.”

Later in the conversation, she shared that she had lost her mother at a very early age and had been raised by her grandmother. When she met Bernard, she was 19 and for all intent and purposes an orphan, while he was 23 and thousands of miles away from the home he grew up in. Mabel said to me, “We recognized that we needed each other”. But, it was not easy. The first few years were fraught with, among other things, great financial difficulties.

Bernard was torn between supporting his wife and staying in college to ensure a better future for both of them. He chose his studies, so they lived in a studio apartment in a condemned building, and both worked several jobs in between their classes to make ends meet. Their first joint tax return showed an annual income of $6500. On the day of our interview, they had celebrated their wedding anniversary 2 days before, on Wednesday April 20^th. They drove down to the Wharton County Courthouse and held each other under the gazebo where they were married 13 years ago, and in Mabel’s words “thanked God for having found each other”. Bernard smiled at the memory.

Tune in tomorrow for Part 2 of this amazing profile, as Bernard talks about the innovative ways he incorporates the various facets of his life: as business owner, as husband, as father to his three children, as philanthropist, and as an ambassador for his homeland.